The Case Against Journalistic Balance

The main event this campaign season, of course, is the matchup between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But the undercard has been almost as compelling a battle, as both parties and both candidates have vented their fury at the press over what they call “false equivalence,” “false balance” and unfairness in coverage. New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd bravely shook the beehive that is the “false balance” controversy in her Sunday column, addressing the catchphrase that Clinton supporters have been using to complain about their candidate’s treatment by the media. Their beef: The press “unfairly equat[es] a minor failing of Hillary Clinton’s to a major failing of Donald Trump’s.” Spayd told the critics to shut up and take their lumps.

So far she has survived her hive-shaking largely unstung, although Jonathan Chait took a good swipe at her on Monday. Spayd holds that more harm will come from journalists being cowed by the prospect of getting a low score in somebody’s “balance” ledger than can come from directly comparing the demerits of Hillary and Donald. I agree, though had I been editing Spayd’s piece, I would have advised her to take the next step: Use the column to reject the chimera of journalistic balance altogether, and enjoin reporters to worry less about the nitpicking of partisans and more about whether they’re aggressively chasing good stories.

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To denounce balance is a heretical act for a journalist. The idea that reporters should aspire to a Zen-like equilibrium that gives all “stakeholders” a say in its shaping has become a tenet of the profession’s religion. The concept has become so engrained in our culture that those scamps at Fox News Channel have co-opted it with their ridiculous “fair and balanced” motto. Fox is many things, but fair and balanced is not one of them. But the sheer power of the words seems to paralyze people from laughing out loud when they hear it intoned on Fox.

A little bit of going-through-the-motions balance can be a harmless thing—you recognize it when you see it, the obligatory quote from the sure-to-be offended party that readers can easily ignore as they absorb the real thrust and import of what the reporter has uncovered. Some editors with a strong ethical commitment to balance have even told me there was no absolute need to publish the “other side’s” comments at all—sometimes, they explain, just making the call and listening to the news source is evidence enough that the reporting was balanced. Their point is that a news story is not a town hall in which every citizen gets to express his view. Rather, it is a distillation of what the reporter and editor decide is true.

But the reporting practice of collecting a pro forma denial or explanation isn’t what the current balance debate is about. The balance brigade phalanxed in front of Clinton wants to use its influence to deter stories about her emails and the Clinton Foundation, two subjects they accuse the press of having overcovered. They want to discourage any direct comparisons between her ethical conduct, her efforts at transparency, and the depth of her policy prescriptions with Trump’s. They would litigate every aspect of news story—length and placement of the story, adjectives used, frequency with which the news outlet reports on the topic, and more—with the goal (to paraphrase Boss Tweed) of “Stopping them damn stories!”

To get a sense of how strident the Clinton acolytes are, look at how Howard Dean went off on NPR’s coverage of Clinton yesterday. NPR! Its treatment of the candidate fills Dean with “disgust.” But Trump is probably a more consistent and vocal critic of the lack of balance and fairness in the press. His protests range from blanket condemnations of press, in which he calls reporters “dishonest and unfair,” to the specific. He once called Fox News Channel “a sometimes awful and unfair media organization.” Being described as a “birther”? Unfair. The structure of the presidential debates? Unfair. Primary debate questions? Unfair. Criticism of Melania Trump for plagiarizing? Unfair. And it’s not just the press that's stacked against Trump, he says, it’s the judiciary, too. Of the Mexican-American judge presiding in a lawsuit against him Trump said, “He is giving us very unfair rulings.”

Trump clearly believes anything negative or disapproving written about him is by definition unfair, an expression of reportorial bias. Unless the media flatters him—as Sean Hannity routinely does—he insists he’s being treated unjustly. Trump isn’t just “playing the ref,” attempting to influence a future call by making a contrived stink about the current one. By protesting almost everything written about him, Trump hopes to discredit anybody—press or political foe—who defies him.

What this comes down to is that no story about Trump’s unethical business practices, his lies about giving to charities, or his bizarre expressions of admiration for Vladimir Putin—all legitimate news targets—can be, in his view, fair. Should such a story offer countervailing evidence that he loves his children or once paid a bill on time? Should it give equal time to Clinton’s offenses? That’s not how journalism works. Trump has proven himself to be a grifter, a liar, and Russian strongman’s sycophant, and there’s no way for a reporter delving into it to “balance” that equation.

Much of the same pertains to the critical journalism published about Clinton. If we’re obsessing about her emails, whose fault is that? If she had handled her emails professionally and left them on government servers, they would have made a minor news blip as Freedom of Information Act requests made them public. Maybe then she would have received the “balance” she and her critics seem to long for today. Her surrogates’ call for balance is really a call for us to ignore her shortcomings because Trump is so much worse. That may make sense in the world of politics, but it’s not a journalistic argument. No matter how bad Trump is, the deep investigations of Clinton’s money, influence and emails are all valid.

By disparaging the rush to balance I don’t mean to suggest that reporters should shut their ears to evidence that contradicts the direction of their stories. If you omit important facts that get in the way of your argument, readers will find you out and discount what you write and what your news outlet publishes. But a slavish devotion to balance—making sure every alpha who expresses an opinion in a piece is paired with a corresponding omega, or shrinking into a defensive ball every time a critic accuses you of overcovering a topic—is injurious to good journalism. To be alive, journalism must be a little swashbuckling, a little deaf to its critics. British journalist Bernard Levin put it best in a November 25, 1980, London Times column, writing [emphasis in the original]:

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly, nor indeed put too extravagantly, that the press has no duty to be responsible at all, and it will be an ill day for freedom if it should ever acquire one. The press is not the Fourth Estate; it is not part of the constitutional structure of the country; it is not, and must never be, governed by any externally imposed rules other than the law of the land."

Reporters who are being hassled by Clintonoids for digging too deeply into Madame Secretary’s past, or Trump reporters who are feeling his wrath, should slough off the criticism and keep on doing what they’re doing. Creating a perfectly balanced story isn’t the same as creating a good story, an observation that should be pinned up in every newsroom. If you’re a reader and you’re worried about balance, your best resort is not making lame complaints but to expand your news diet. Balance may be necessary to the practice of journalism, but it will never be sufficient.

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I found that Levin quotation in the work of the late Alexander Cockburn, who once wrote, “Journalists should pride themselves on their lowly status as scoundrels and junkyard dogs, only a yard or two ahead of the gendarmes and with prison or the stocks the reward for doing a job properly. Now the idea is to have the moral standing of bishops. What rubbish! What pretension! If journalists want to be bishops, they should go into the Holy Orders.” Send choice journalism quotations via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts tilt, my Twitter feed slopes, and my RSS feed leans.